The US Department of Commerce yesterday said it plans to award SK Hynix Inc up to US$450 million in grants to help fund an advanced packaging plant and research and development (R&D) facility for artificial intelligence (AI) products in Indiana.
In April, SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memorychip maker, said it would invest about US$3.87 billion to build the facility in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The facility would include an advanced chip production line to mass-produce next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, currently used in graphic processing units that train AI systems, the Nvidia Corp supplier said.
Photo: Bloomberg
The commerce department also plans to make available US$500 million in government loans for the SK Hynix project, which is expected to qualify for a 25 percent investment tax credit.
The memory packaging plant for AI products and an advanced packaging R&D facility would create 1,000 jobs and fill a key gap in the US semiconductor supply chain, the department said.
The US Congress in August 2022 approved a US$39 billion subsidy program for US semiconductor manufacturing and related components along with US$75 billion in government lending authority.
US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said that the department has announced term sheets with 15 companies offering about US$30 billion in funding that “will unlock another US$300 billion of private capital.”
The US has major commitments from all five major leading-edge semiconductor chip manufacturers — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), Intel Corp, Samsung Electronics Co, Micron Technology Inc and SK Hynix.
“It means we in the United States will have the most secure and diverse supply chain in the world for the advanced semiconductors that power artificial intelligence,” Raimondo told reporters.
No other economy in the world “has more than two of these companies producing leading-edge chips on its shores,” the department added.
SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said in a statement that the company deeply appreciates “the US Department of Commerce’s support and is excited to collaborate in seeing this transformational project fully realized.”
The department in May said it planned to award US$75 million to Absolics Inc for constructing a facility in Georgia to supply advanced materials to the country’s semiconductor industry.
The planned award is to an affiliate of SKC Co, which in turn is part of South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate SK Group, as is SK Hynix.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS